FLASHBACK Read Online Free PDF Page B

Devine did not appear on René’s patient census for the last six months. And all of the woman’s medication orders were from last February or earlier. René felt Menard’s eyes scratch at her for an explanation. If she overreacted, he’d want to know how she could have a half-year hole in her records; then he’d go to Broadview to complain, and in no time her superiors at CommCare would wonder why they hired her. “A little computer glitch. Okay, here we are,” she pretended. “From what I can tell, she hadn’t been on any kinds of meds that would cause such behavior.”
    “Any record of psychotic behavior on the ward or before?”
    René checked the nurses’ notes to the six-month dead-end, feeling her face flush, and trying not to let on that she somehow had screwed up. “No. In fact, she was pretty well behaved.” Then some nurse’s notes made her smile. “Apparently she came out with some funny lyrics.” And she read: “‘Roses are red, violets are blue, look at my titties and say I do! ‘Had us laughing out loud,’ one nurse wrote. She also once announced that she was having a baby. Doesn’t sound like someone who’d attack a perfect stranger.”
    “No, but she sounds delusional.”
    “Many dementia patients are, but that doesn’t mean violent.”
    Menard laid his pen hand on the clipboard. “So what do you think happened, Ms. Ballard?”
    “I don’t have a clue.” But she’d go back to the home and double-check the master charts to see what she’d missed—and why there was a six-month blank in her files. She closed her laptop, feeling distracted that something was amiss. She had prided herself on keeping meticulous details, of being able to hold in her head the hundreds of unpronounceable syllables that made up drug indices, the technical details of complex chemical arrangements, their intended effects and side effects. And she had worked to attach names and
faces to the reams of data. Yet here she was missing records of a patient who was the epicenter of a murder investigation. “So what happens to her now?”
    “Well, she’s been sent to McLean’s for evaluation.”
    McLean’s Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts—part of Harvard Medical School—was one of the top psychiatric hospitals in the nation, and where dangerous patients were evaluated.
    Menard got up and headed for the door, stopping by a table with an array of photographs. One of them was a shot of René in her cap and gown posing with her parents and Nick Mavros, her favorite professor at the New England School of Pharmacy. Beside it were pictures of her father, before he got sick. Also one of him as a little boy in a porch rocking chair—an image of him that she adored. Menard picked up a close-up portrait of Silky. “Is this the guy I met earlier?”
    “Yes. Silky.” In the picture, the black longhaired tabby with the white nose patch looked like a mobster with a menacing wide-eyed gaze—the kind of photo you’d imagine hanging in a mouse post office stamped WANTED. At the moment he was out back thinking about chipmunks.
    “For the record, are you living alone?”
    The question sent a little ripple of unease through her. Until a few months ago, she had been living in Boston with Todd and planning a June marriage—June 26, to be exact. Then after nearly two years of cohabitation—bridal gown purchase, Mr. Tux reservations, seat upgrades on Delta flights to Maui, seaside view at the Kapalua Bay Hotel, honeymoon-special sunset-mai-tai-catamaran cruise, and one hundred and twenty unused “René and Todd” invitations—dear old Todd, in a last-moment panic, decided he couldn’t go through with it and moved back to New Jersey, where he took up with his high school girlfriend.
    If the jilting hadn’t been so painful, it would’ve been comic. In her twenty-nine years, René had never met or heard of any woman or man actually being jilted. Todd’s announcement raised a lot of screaming and accusations, but he